Ch 15 Page 90: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air - 0 views
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This river of reading material and advertising junk pouring through our letterboxes contains energy. It also costs energy to make and deliver. Paper has an embodied energy of 10 kWh per kg. So the energy embodied in a typical personal flow of junk mail, magazines, and newspapers, amounting to 200 g of paper per day (that’s equivalent to one Independent per day for example) is about 2 kWh per day.
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A new car’s embodied energy is 76 000 kWh – so if you get one every 15 years, that’s an average energy cost of 14 kWh per day. A life-cycle analysis by Treloar, Love, and Crawford estimates that building an Australian road costs 7600 kWh per metre (a continuously reinforced concrete road), and that, including maintenance costs, the total cost over 40 years was 35 000 kWh per metre.
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Can we scale this for trains? 400x bigger vehicles / 2x usable life / total numbers deployed (or required?) vs 33 million cars. And the rail network... Did I miss a discussion of train production and infrastructure elsewhere?
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Energy cost of junk mail and newspapers - 2kwh/day - half what we use to light ourselves.
